SDSU Mechatronics Club Competes at the 17th Annual RoboSub Competition

Akash Khatawate, left, a member of the San Diego State University Mechatronics Club launches “Endeavor,” as diver, Brian Adams looks on during the 17th annual RoboSub competition for autonomous underwater vehicles held at SPAWAR, Systems Center Pacific Transducer Evaluation Center (TRANSDEC) pool in Point Loma. — Photo by Howard Lipin

The SDSU Mechatronics club competed in the RoboSub 2014 competition hosted at SPAWAR this weekend. The competition brought together 39 teams of students from 10 different countries. There were teams from the United States, Spain, China, India, Turkey, Japan, Sweden, Iceland, Canada and – for the first time – a team from the Russian Federation.

The Mechatronics club members worked for the last academic year to build their robosub, an autonomous underwater vehicle, that they named “The Endeavor”. The team had to make sure that the Endeavor could maneuver around an underwater course, that included going through an underwater gate, touch a buoy, and follow a track on the pool’s floor. The team built the Endeavor from the ground up and had to write over 10,000 lines of code to make the robosub function.

The club was one of the 27 teams out of the 39 that made it to the semi-finals. This was a very great showing and the club is excited to take what they learned from this experience and from the other teams and start working on changes for next year’s competition. At the end of the competition Mechatronics ended up placing in 8th position. This is a great feat as this was their first year competing, where as the top teams have been competing for 10 plus years. The competition and the SDSU team was highlighted in the Union Tribune, you can Read Article. The Mechatronics club also created a video of their experience which you can View Video.

The Mechatronics club is looking for Computer Science students to join their team and help with the coding for next year’s competition. If this is something you are interested in you can find information on their web page. You can also email them at sdsumechatronics@gmail.com